Along with an electrical engineer friend, I am in the early stages of working on an idea for a project I wish existed, but doesn’t (to the best of my knowledge).

Sometimes power outages happen, especially short ones. In order to survive these blips, most people would install a UPS between the wall and the power supply. Unfortunately, most uninterruptible power supplies are bulky, use lead-acid batteries that don’t last very long, and beep once they die.

I have designed a PC expansion card that sits between the existing power supply and the motherboard, GPU, and hard drives, etc. Up to two modular LiFePO4 batteries that fit into unused 3.5” HDD slots can be plugged into the expansion card. The batteries can last around 10 years and the packs can be replaced at the end of their life. 

Essentially, it can turn any mid-tower PC into a sort of laptop with a battery big enough to allow a graceful shutdown or hibernation via a usb jumper to the motherboard.

Improvements over existing UPS’s:

1. Small and lightweight to ship - no need for additional AC->DC->AC Circuitry
2. Completely internal
3. Long battery life
4. Modular and replaceable battery packs
5. No beeping
6. Graceful shutdown or hibernation on mains power-loss
7. Will auto-restart your PC when mains power is restored

What I am not claiming:

1. That you can continue hardcore gaming or intense rendering
2. Surge protection 
3. Backup power for external devices

I am thinking about the casual home server builder who wants to recycle an existing gaming PC chassis into a dedicated server with TrueNAS or Proxmox, not the power user who has a rack mount in their extra closet. Something neatly internal with a high WAF (wife acceptance factor).

I wrote this post to gauge interest in the idea, and to see what features you would like to see in v1. My next step will be to build and test a physical prototype.

Possible extra add on features, depending on interest:

•2.5” SSD-Sized battery pack for smaller form factor PC’s

•Built-in KVM over IP controller with HDMI jumper to GPU or motherboard

•Built-in extra SATA ports

So 3 Questions:

1. Does it interest you?
2. Is it something you would pay for?
3. What haven’t I thought of yet?

Using an old laptop with a grossly underpowered cpu but its up! Was wondering though about when I change out my laptop to something better, will my hard drives have to be formatted or am I wrong. Couldn't really find good info on it.

I'm using ZimaOS for my server. No Linux or windows.

After the red 3-node Lab Rax, I built a second one, this time in blue and with a different goal: something a non-technical person can plug into their router and actually use every day without ever opening a terminal.

What it does:

• Movies & shows on any TV, phone or tablet (Jellyfin, with Intel Quick Sync hardware transcoding)
• Automatic photo & video backup from phones (Immich)
• Shared network drive for the house (Samba)
• Network-wide ad-blocking (AdGuard Home, optional)
• Radarr / Sonarr / Prowlarr / qBittorrent with hardlinks for managing the media library

What's inside:

• Dell OptiPlex 3040 Micro: i5-6500T, 12GB RAM, 256GB SSD
• Datto Alto: Celeron 3865U, 16GB RAM, 120GB SSD
• D-Link 5-port Gigabit switch built into the front panel, plus keystone jacks
• 2x 4TB Seagate drives (one for media, one for photos) on SATA-to-USB adapters inside the case
• Top exhaust fan, carry handles, and "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" on the front

Software side:

• Proxmox VE 9 on both, as two standalone hosts (not clustered on purpose, with only two nodes I didn't want to deal with quorum)
• 6 LXC containers: Jellyfin, the media stack, Samba, AdGuard, Immich (Docker) and a small dashboard
• Everything on DHCP with .local names (mDNS), so it works on any home network without changing a single IP
• Custom dashboard at labrax.local: status lights for every service, one-click links to all apps, search & add movies/shows, delete old titles to free up space, and one shared password for all the apps that can be changed from one place (screenshot in the gallery, password hidden). The dashboard and its API were written with AI help.
• Both hosts power back on by themselves after a power outage

Lessons learned: the Datto wouldn't come back after a power cut because its CMOS battery was dead, and it's not a regular coin cell but one with a 2-pin connector, so I had to order a CR2032 with leads. Also, going full DHCP + mDNS instead of static IPs made the whole thing portable, which was the main point of this build.

Happy to answer questions about the case or the setup!

Budget : $500-$800
Use-Case: home server - games, movies, photo files, comms app.
Country of purchase - USA
Peripherals needed - none
Any other requirements / preferences:**

I would like to build a small computer(or buy used) to host a game server with possibility for lots of mods (Valheim, arma, minecraft-type games), host a fluxer instance(communication), and have media for movies.

I want this to be accessible to friends (at most 3-5 per game server, fluxer instance) who can also stream movies from a drive.

I would like to make it a minipc or at least smaller than atx tower.

I have a personal computer that dual boots win11 and linux(cachyos), but I don't want to keep it on all the time. So I would play/watch from my main computer through the newly built server in the same house, but want friends to be able to access as well.

I just built my main computer and OUCH $$$ so I am looking to buy used or built modestly. Probably under $500-$800. I am trying to understand what level of computer build I need for the above uses and if it's possible to do all three on one server computer.

If adding $50 here and there to get a build that can do all this comfortably and a the same time(?), I dont mind that. I would prefer a better experience for me and friends in game/watching movies via jellyfin.

I've watched some videos about doing each of these things but am unsure if one comp can do all three. This server build would sit in a closet connected wired to gigabit internet.

Im ok at computer stuff and only just started learning linux via cachyos, so if there are products like AMP, tailscale, proxmox that people think are good I'd prefer paying a little over having to look up every single issue at every step.

Do I need a separate copy of each game I will be hosting on the server comp?

Drive for OS and server would likely be a 500gb or 1tb ssd nvme or sata. Movie bluray files are large so probably a 2tb drive for that. Is it worth getting an ssd over a Hdd for movie streaming to work well for friends accessing outside of my home?

If the server build is linux only can I sync my current ntfs movie drive on win11 to that server linux drive that would brtfs?

Thanks.

Already had a suggestion from another thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1xfgd6t/building_small_server_for_hosting_game/19ro96l0t1hpd/

I’ll do my best to keep this short and to the point.
I have a dell optiplex 3060 with a core I5-8500T, 16gb ddr4, a 128gb SATA M.2 and a 1TB SATA 2.5 drive inside of the machine and an assortment of 1-4tb HDD’s that I intend to build an enclosure for once they become useful.

My equipment: aside from what’s shown in the images I have a main windows pc, a 3d printer (10 inch rack is fully printed) and a variety of cables and whatnot.

My main goal is to run plex for my family, have some nas style storage (not a priority at all) and to run game servers (satisfactory and maybe Minecraft)

Currently I have Ubuntu desktop running as Ubuntu server gave me some issues relating to probing the drives.

I’m happy to switch OS and anything else needed to make it work

(I do intend to get a few more mini PC’s in the coming months so I can have a cluster with each task having a dedicated node).

If anyone has a guide or knows of a guide then please do share :)

The model (Whistle by Cactus Compute) is
16.9 MB, which is too big for the board. I cut the decoder from 8 layers to 4, bringing it to
14.5 MB with about 11.5% word error rate. I wrote the inference engine from scratch in C, using 2-bit weights, the S3's vector instructions and both CPU cores.
Check my detail blog on this: https://amal.vs.binarybit.in/blog/6adf1f677027b216982a9889

Hello guys,

I want to have a computer with home assitance and something to downloads torrents or something like this and see it on some tvs.

Which infraestructure do you think is needed?

I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 Tiny Desktop with an i5 and 16gb ram that i want to use.

can i get a linux and something to get both systems? or just home assitance OS with an add on?

Thanks for all the help you could give me !

Hi,
Looking for some advice to setup a Home media server, I can google the setup info & take it from there, just unsure about the best route to take given limitations of older hardware listed below.
Will be using for Movies, TV shows and Music (all in 2 channel only)

QNAP TS-251+-2G 2 Bay, Intel Celeron 2.0 GHz Quad Core Processor, (2 x 4 GB) DDR3 RAM, 2 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 6 TB 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive 7200 RPM, 256 MB Cache.

Apple Mac Mini 2012, 2.5 GHz Intel i5 dual core, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Thanks.